The Agony of Instagram

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CreditCreditKatherine Streeter

By Alex Williams

Dec. 13, 2013

Erin Wurzel, 26, thought she had plenty to feel thankful about this Thanksgiving weekend: she is engaged to a great guy (and was spending the holiday with his family), working on a her first novel and taking French with an eye to moving to Paris someday.

Then she checked her Instagram feed.

One friend had posted a Martha Stewart-worthy photo of her “mashed potato bar” featuring 15 spud-filled martini glasses artfully arranged in a pyramid, alongside a matching pyramid of bowls of homemade condiments.

Another friend had posted a close-up of a cranberry barrel, with a sieve scooping up a Technicolor explosion of the crimson fruit above the caption, “Last-minute grocery run.”

A third posted her holiday table setting in Paris, complete with burning candles, rolled napkins with napkin rings, an open Champagne bottle, a huge centerpiece of fall flowers and the illuminated Eiffel Tower framed in a casement window.

“I let out an ‘Oh, my God!,’ like a little kid who wants something they cannot have,” said Ms. Wurzel, a program analyst in Philadelphia who uses the Instagram handle likewantneed. “You’re searching through your feed and a picture will hit you, like that Paris shot. It’s just so perfect. You just think, ‘I want that, I want that life.’ ”

It’s called Instagram envy, and Ms. Wurzel had it bad.

For many urban creative professionals these days, it’s not unusual to scroll through one’s Instagram feed and feel suffocated by fabulousness: There’s one friend paddling in the surf at Positano under a fiery Italian sunset. Another is snapping away at a sweaty Thom Yorke from the third row at an Atoms for Peace concert in Austin. Yet another is sipping Champagne in Lufthansa business class en route to Frankfurt, while a fourth is huddling with friends over omakase at Masa.

Members of the Facebook generation are no strangers to the sensation of feeling a little left out when their friends post from that book party they weren’t invited to, or from someone’s latest transporting trip to the white sands of Tulum. Yet even for those familiar with the concept of social-media envy, Instagram — the highest achievement yet in social-media voyeurism — presents a new form of torture.

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Sara Benincasa, left, a writer and comedian, says she often ponders her life after posts from exotic places from her friend Heather Fink, right, a filmmaker and sound mixer. Ms. Fink says she only means to inspire.CreditLeft: Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times, Right: Deidre Schoo for The New York Times

On Instagram, there is none of the familiar messiness of Facebook (which bought Instagram last year for about $1 billion) or Twitter, where the torrent of wish-you-were-here-but-not-really posts are lost in a clutter of birthday wishes to Aunt Candace, one-liners about airline food and links to the latest Onion headline or New Republic deconstruction of Obamacare.

Instagram, rather, is about unadulterated voyeurism. It is almost entirely a photo site, with a built-in ability (through the site’s retro-style filters) to idealize every moment, encouraging users to create art-directed magazine layouts of their lives, as if everyone is suddenly Diana Vreeland.

Mayoli Weidelich, 24, an Internet marketing manager and blogger in Toronto, said she once spent 10 minutes with a friend composing a picture of a margarita glass over a plate of tacos at a Mexican restaurant. The intention was not to show off, Ms. Weidelich said. She was simply following an unspoken rule adopted by Instagram users to avoid populating feeds with unedited, mediocre images.

“My Facebook feed is full of mostly opinionated rants and articles links, neither of which cause any jealousy,” Ms. Weidelich said. “My Instagram feed, in comparison, is one amazing photo after another.”

Viewers, meanwhile, are expected to let the sumptuous photos wash over them and chip in with comments (“Gorgeous sunset!”) and heart-shape “likes,” which function as a form of social currency, reinforcing the idea that every shot is a performance worthy of applause. The result is an online culture where the ethic is impress, rather than confess.

It is as if every last image is designed to call to mind Norman Mailer’s book title, “Advertisements for Myself.”

Envy, of course, doesn’t operate in a social vacuum. It needs an object of desire. And everyone, it seems, has that friend on Instagram: the one with the perfect clothes and the perfect hair and seemingly perfect life — which seem all the more perfect when rendered in the rich teals and vivid ambers of Instagram’s filters.

For Sara Benincasa, 33, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles, that friend is Heather Fink, whose work as a filmmaker and sound technician takes her to exotic locales, which she dutifully records on Instagram.

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Images to make mouths water are rife on Instagram. Some of these tantalizing shots are from the Instagram account of nytimesfashion.

Ms. Benincasa recalled being at a CVS drugstore, waiting to pick up her refills of Prozac and Klonapin, when she began scrolling through Ms. Fink’s feed, which is updated frequently, especially when Ms. Fink is jetting around the world.

“She’s in Cannes, she’s in New Mexico. She’s in Abu Dhabi for a film shoot. She’s going to Holland. She was just at Jared Harris’s wedding on a yacht in Miami,” Ms. Benincasa said. “I’m standing there in my stained sweatpants, I was thinking, ‘I really need to up my game in life.’ ”

Instagram, which this year alone grew to 150 million users from 80 million users worldwide, became a social phenomenon in part because it allowed people to transform snapshots into magazine-worthy images and share them easily with friends. Thanks to the built-in filters, many of which imbue the photos with a kind of digital nostalgia by mimicking the look of old lenses and film stock, everyone looks a little younger, a bit prettier, more cover-worthy.

The stage-managing impulse seems particularly strong among young parents, who appear to conjure the spirit of Norman Rockwell every time they whip out their iPhones to snap a shot of their adorable, smiling children.

Jessica Faryar, 32, an at-home mother in Seattle, remembers seeing one such photo featuring a family that had “leaves shipped in from out of state, just so the kids could jump in them,” said Ms. Faryar, who follows about 100 people, mostly friends and bloggers she likes. “Meanwhile, we’re drowning in leaves, and my son just talks about how messy the sidewalk looks.”

Robyn Mermelstein, 35, an executive for a natural foods company who lives in Long Island, often finds herself looking at such shots from one particular friend while breast-feeding her infant daughter at 3 a.m.

“I’ll swear that a White House photographer follows them around,” said Ms. Mermelstein, who follows 137 people on Instagram, mostly friends, and keeps her account private to prevent others from seeing her photos. (On Thursday, Instagram announced a new feature that will let users share photos with selected friends.) “The full family of four is in every photo. Whether it’s the first day of school, apple picking, summer camp, the playground or on vacation, all four super-happy family members fill each and every frame.”

Instagram envy may constitute the most first-world of problems, but it is starting to attract the attention of some lab-coat types like Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist and research fellow at the University of Oxford, who are going so far as to try to quantify FOMO (fear of missing out) and finding that Instagram is the biggest culprit among social networks.

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Instagram images.

That is hardly news to Anne Sage, 31, a freelance writer and blogger in Los Angeles, who follows 1,009 people on Instagram, and therefore has 1,009 opportunities to feel she’s missing out on the party on any given weekend. “It’s incredibly hurtful to find out via social media that your friends or colleagues are gathering for something that you’ve been left out of,” Ms. Sage said. “And of course these events always flood your feed simultaneously, with everyone sharing photos and hashtags at once, so it’s like pouring salt on the wound.”

Unless 150 million users decide to go off Instagram cold turkey en masse, Instagram envy may turn out to be an epidemic with no cure.

But at least there may be a salve. It helps when our fabulous friends declare a moratorium on friend-torture. Indeed, many golden children of Instagram are already learning to rein it in, adopting their own form of Instagram etiquette.

“I don’t put in photos of myself, or even my shoes, for that matter,” said David Coggins, a dapper Manhattan writer; granted, he has posted Instagram shots from the beach at Santa Barbara, the paneled clubs of London and the temples of Kyoto on Instagram, all within the last two months.

“My feeling is that you should avoid trophies: no fancy bottles of Bordeaux, no epic trout, no French hotel suites, nothing from business class,” added Mr. Coggins, 38. “If it’s eccentric, then that’s different. I’m for a private plane if it’s a float plane that’s going to drop you into a remote pond in northern Maine. That’s a unique experience that’s genuinely cool.”

And then there’s Heather Fink, the filmmaker friend of Ms. Benincasa’s, whose seemingly magical adventures echo all the way to the aisles of a CVS in Southern California.

Ms. Fink, 32, said she is all too aware of the obnoxious people on Instagram, and she takes care not to be one of them.

“There are a lot of awful braggarts whose posts have a vibe of ‘Hey, you’re not invited to my awesome.’ ” She tries to leaven her dispatches from exotic places with offbeat humor, like posting shots of a man walking pigs at the Cannes International Film Festival, rather than just another shot of a movie star.

The overall intent, she said, is not to inspire envy, but simply, to inspire. “If I knew any of the posts made someone feel bad,” Ms. Fink said, “I’d remind them that the world is their oyster, too, and they need to start shucking.”